1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid droplet discharge device including a wiping member that wipes a liquid droplet discharge surface of a liquid droplet discharge head, and a method of manufacturing the liquid droplet discharge device.
2. Related Art
A liquid droplet discharge device such as an inkjet printer has many advantages in which noise during recording is extremely small, high-speed printing is possible, ink choices vary, cheap plain paper can be used, or the like. For example, as shown in FIG. 15, a liquid droplet discharge head used for such a liquid droplet discharge device has a nozzle plate 1 formed with a plurality of nozzle holes 11 configured to discharge the ink droplet, and a liquid-resistant protective layer 16 and a liquid repellent layer 17 including liquid repellent characteristics with respect to the ink are formed on a liquid droplet discharge surface 1a of the nozzle plate 1.
The nozzle plate 1 is formed with the liquid repellent layer 17 on a large substrate, and then is cut into the nozzle plate 1 of a single item size (see, JP-A-2010-240852). For this reason, the liquid-resistant protective layer 16 and the liquid repellent layer 17 are not formed on end surfaces 101 and 102 of the nozzle plate 1.
As shown in FIG. 15, since the liquid repellent layer 17 is not formed on the end surfaces 101 and 102 of the nozzle plate 1, when a wiping member 4 configured to wipe the liquid droplet discharge surface 1a of a liquid droplet discharge head 10 is provided in the liquid droplet discharge device, there is a concern that the liquid repellent layer 17 may be peeled off when the wiping member 4 comes into contact with an edge of the liquid repellent layer 17. Thus, there is a need to prevent the wiping member 4 from coming into contact with the edge of the liquid repellent layer 17, by covering end portions 106 and 107 of the nozzle plate 1 with a fixing plate 18 that fixes the liquid droplet discharge head 10 to a head supporter.
However, in order to cover the end portions 106 and 107 of the nozzle plate 1 with the fixing plate 18, since there is a need to increase a size of the nozzle plate 1, there is a problem in that the costs of the nozzle plate 1 increase or the like.